


Late-Night Gingerbread

by Silveny-Dreams (VintageOT5)



Category: Keeper of the Lost Cities Series - Shannon Messenger
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Fluff, fits into canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2020-02-09 15:15:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18640693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VintageOT5/pseuds/Silveny-Dreams
Summary: Sophie Elizabeth Foster hadn’t had gingerbread anything in a year and a half, and she decided that tonight, enough was enough. She needed gingerbread, and she needed it yesterday.And it had nothing to do with that looming cliff’s edge in the back of her mind, always there, always waiting for her to stumble back and fall from it into that Void that was Losing Her Human Family, her human life. No. This was strictly for her tastebuds.(She wasn’t fooling herself.)Or the one where Sophie continues to have an unhealthy relationship with sleep but she gets good gingerbread out of it, plus Keefe.





	Late-Night Gingerbread

Sophie Elizabeth Foster hadn’t had gingerbread _anything_ in a year and a half, and she decided that tonight, enough was enough. She needed gingerbread, and she needed it yesterday.

And it had nothing to do with that looming cliff’s edge in the back of her mind, always there, always waiting for her to stumble back and fall from it into that Void that was Losing Her Human Family, her human life. No. This was strictly for her tastebuds.

(She wasn’t fooling herself.)

“Most elves your age are in deep REM at this hour,” her goblin bodyguard, Sandor, commented as she slipped out of her bedroom and headed downstairs to the kitchen.

“Have I… _ever_ been in deep REM, as long as you’ve known me?” Sophie whispered, keeping her footsteps quiet.

“Not of your own free will, no,” Sandor admitted as Sophie walked into the kitchen and clapped on the lights. “But it’s never too early to try.”

“I need gingerbread.” Sophie shrugged, opening a couple of the cabinets where she knew Grady and Edaline kept ingredients that humans used.

If her family hadn’t made their gingerbread by hand every year, not the stuff from a box mix, she would have despaired. As it was, Sophie grabbed the sugar and flour and spices and put them all on the kitchen island, turning to find the mixing bowl.

She felt a light buzzing in her pajamas pocket. Frowning, she pulled out her Imparter; who could possibly be hailing her at this hour?

“Keefe?” Sophie answered the hail.

Keefe Sencen’s blonde hair wasn’t as mussed as usual, and his smirk didn’t quite meet his ice blue eyes. In fact, his eyes looked a little puffy.

“Foster. I shouldn’t have even bothered worrying I’d wake you; I don’t think you’ve ever slept since we met.”

“What’s wrong?” Sophie hopped up and sat on the kitchen counter.

“Whoa, whoa, no need for the emotion-fest. It’s not a big deal.”

“You can’t sense my emotions through the Imparter.”

“I know,” Keefe grinned. “But I know you too well. Can I maybe…come in?”

Sophie blinked. “Come in where?”

Keefe rubbed the back of his neck and smiled sheepishly. “Um…Havenfield?”

“You’re _here?_ ” Sophie hopped off the counter and started for the front door, Sandor on her heels.

She jogged through the front hall and pulled the door open, and there he was on the stoop, still in actual clothes.

He rocked back and forth on his feet, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Figured you couldn’t miss me too much if I was, you know…here.”

Sophie didn’t say anything, just opened the door wider to let him in.

Sandor blocked Keefe’s path for a moment. “How did you end up here instead of at the leapmaster?”

“Easy, Gigantor,” Keefe lifted his hands. “Your leapmaster must be turned off, so I leapt here. I think one of Foster’s home crystals must’ve broken off her necklace when she was at Candleshade at some point. I found it on the floor in my room a while back.”

“And you’ve kept it all this time?” Sandor questioned, folding his arms across his chest.

“Of course! I have to be available for all Foster emergencies, regardless of whether my father has his leapmaster on or not.”

Keefe grinned and winked at Sophie, but she didn’t smile.

Sandor begrudgingly stepped aside to let Keefe in, rolling his eyes as Keefe clapped him on his meaty bicep.

“Oof, keep that to yourself,” Keefe insisted, waving his hand at the air between him and Sophie. “Sheesh, Foster, you’ll pass out if you keep being that worried.”

But Sophie didn’t listen, didn’t care about his stupidly strong Empath abilities for once.

“What’s _wrong_ , Keefe?” she asked, shutting the door behind him quietly. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened,” Keefe insisted. “It’s just…no, nothing happened.”

“Keefe.”

“There’s that Foster annoyance I know and love,” he smirked. “Seriously, nothing happened. I just didn’t…I don’t think I can really handle the whole ‘living-at-Candleshade’ thing right now.”

“Your mom didn’t show up, did she?” Sophie asked, resisting the nervous habit to tug out one of her eyelashes. Keefe’s mom, Lady Gisela, was…not a friend of Sophie and her friends and family. Keefe had it even worse—he was related to her whether he wanted to be or not.

Keefe scoffed. “Like she’d get away with that after all this time. Dear old Dad’s gone absolutely berserk with new security stuff, even some things specifically tailored to her. Which means it’s just me and him there, which is…about as fun as you’d expect.”

Sophie sighed, grabbing Keefe’s hand and giving it a squeeze. “Wanna come watch me make gingerbread?”

“What’s gingerbread?”

Sophie shrugged as she gently led him through the house and back towards the kitchen. “It’s a human thing. One of those foods we like to make around this time of year. It’s Christmastime in the forbidden cities right now.”

“Ooh, Christmas, I know about that one. That’s the one where they have a tree corpse in their house that they put lots of knick-knacks on and some big guy wearing a ridiculous suit gives kids rocks?”

Sophie snorted. “Uh…kinda.”

“What is gingerbread supposed to taste like, anyway?”

“Nothing like mallowmelt or ripplepuffs,” Sophie admitted. “But…we used to make it at Christmas and it’s sweet and spicy and I miss it.”

That cliff’s edge loomed ever closer in Sophie’s mind, and she wondered if Keefe could feel it, too.

“Well, I’ll help,” Keefe offered, his voice a little softer than usual. “Boss me around, Foster. I showed up unannounced; now I’m your personal servant.”

Making gingerbread with Keefe was a lot slower than it had been in San Diego with her family. Mostly because Keefe, in typical Keefe fashion, spent half the time he was supposed to be measuring out ingredients doing his usual flirt-teasing. Everything Sophie was in charge of was ready and Keefe was only half-done when she finally plucked up a pinch of flour and flicked it in his face to try and get him to focus.

“Ooh, you did _not_ want to start that fight,” Keefe promised, grinning, as he reached into the flour pot and flicked a whole fistful back at Sophie.

“Keefe, you’re—” Sophie laughed, ducking and reaching out to poke him in the ribs. “You’re supposed to be helping.”

“What can I say? I’m going rogue!” Keefe insisted, squirming away as Sophie found the measuring cup of flour and shook it over his head.

Sophie tried shielding herself behind the kitchen island, cough-laughing as Keefe got flour in her face.

“Is everything okay, Sophie?”

Sophie whirled around. Edaline was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking elegant even in her nightclothes.

“Mom!” Sophie said, all rational explanations mysteriously gone from her brain.

Edaline blinked. “Keefe?”

Keefe tried for bravado, smiling weakly. “Heyyyyy.”

“We’re fine,” Sophie told her, trying to wipe the flour off of her face. “I was making gingerbread because I couldn’t sleep and Keefe’s…here.”

“I can see that,” Edaline said, folding her arms across her chest, although hints of a grin quirked at her lips. “To what do we owe this pleasure, Mr. Sencen?”

“He’s here to keep away from Candleshade,” Sandor offered from his post just outside the doorway. “And because he knows Miss Foster doesn’t have what anyone would call regular sleeping habits.”

“I can go, I shouldn’t have just invited myself over,” Keefe said, and Sophie could see his face turning red under all the flour.

Edaline offered a wry smile. “Well, you’re certainly not leaving just yet. This place looks like a Froster made it snow in here.”

There was flour pretty much everywhere, although the other already-measured ingredients were mercifully un-bothered.

“We’ll start cleaning,” Sophie mumbled, heading to the pantry to find a broom.

“Nonsense.” Edaline snapped her fingers, and all the misplaced flour was gone. She picked up the empty mixing bowl—although Sophie could see now that she’d conjured all the flour into it—and dumped it into the compost pile. “Just show us how to make gingerbread. I hear it’s delicious.”

Which is how Sophie started bossing two elves around instead, relegating Keefe to the mixing instead of the measuring. Somehow Edaline conjured up the wet ingredients from somewhere, and before long the batter was forming a dark brown, doughy ball around Keefe’s mixing spoon. The familiar scent tugged at Sophie, and a brief image of her parents and Amy gathered in the kitchen cutting cookies flashed through her mind.

“We messed it up, didn’t we,” Keefe said, looking at Sophie’s face with a slight crease between his brows. “Is this dough too elf-y?”

“No, it’s…” Sophie trailed off, taking the spoon from Keefe and scooping the dough from the spoon and into her hands. “This is exactly right.”

She didn’t like the look of concern on Edaline and Keefe’s faces, so she pulled it together. “Although we’ll need more flour, a rolling pin, and…do elves have cookies, or cookie cutters? Usually gingerbread is cut into little person shapes.”

“Just the sort of crazy human stuff I was hoping to learn when we became friends!” Keefe sighed dreamily, and Sophie stuck out her tongue at him.

“I’ll go ask the gnomes if they have any way to make something like that,” Edaline offered, snapping her fingers and conjuring a rolling pin onto the counter.

Sophie set the dough ball aside and dusted the counter with flour, studiously avoiding Keefe’s gaze.

“Foster, how many times have you tried to avoid telling me things, and exactly how many times have you succeeded?”

“Empaths,” Sophie grumbled under her breath.

“Do you miss them?”

Sophie knew exactly whom he meant. She finished sprinkling the flour and leaned against the counter, feeling that ache in her chest that was always there, under everything else. “I know I shouldn’t…it’s my own fault. But I can’t help it.”

“Hey, whoa, it’s _not_ illegal to miss any of that. That’s who you grew up with, your childhood.”

Keefe slid closer to her, and Sophie plopped her forehead against his shoulder. “It just feels stupid.”

“If you want stupid, try missing people you don’t even like,” Keefe joked, but Sophie heard the sharpness of the pain in each word.

“I just don’t want to make Grady and Edaline feel bad. They’re my parents, too.”

Keefe hooked his arm around her shoulders. “They’re not monsters, Foster. They know you’re in this, like, unbelievably impossible situation where you have literally _three_ sets of parents. Seriously. Only you.”

Sophie groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

“I can’t help it, it’s my job to spread the misery around,” Keefe chuckled.

Sophie lifted her head, and Keefe arched an eyebrow.

“How about this. I won’t judge you for missing them, and you won’t judge me for missing my horrible excuse for a mom…and even my dad, a little bit, however that’s supposed to work. We can be a non-judgmental misery party of two.”

“Wow, what a blast,” Sophie said dryly, smirking.

“It’s always a fun time for Team Foster-Keefe!”

Sophie rolled her eyes, but that ache in her chest was fading into the background again. “Fine. Deal.”

Keefe grinned, and Sophie was suddenly aware of how close they were standing, how touchy they were with each other. She swallowed, her pulse picking up, and she was pretty sure Keefe noticed.

He took a small step back, taking his arm off her shoulders and gently booping her nose. “Okay, show me more about this mysterious gingerbread human ritual. Do humans…eat each other?”

“What?! No! Well…” Sophie’s mind trailed off to cannibalism.

Keefe’s eyes widened. “Oh no. No. This is _not_ the crazy human stuff I signed up for.”

“They don’t eat each other, Keefe!”

“Nice try. If they don’t eat each other, why do they make their cookies shaped like people?”

“It’s supposed to be…cute, I think,” Sophie insisted as she rolled out the dough. “They make little houses out of gingerbread, too.”

“What? And we aren’t making _that?_ ”

“No such luck with the gnomes.” Edaline swept back into the room. “But I think I may have a solution.”

Edaline pulled a sheath of baking paper and a pencil from a drawer. “If you draw the shape you want, we can cut it out and then trace around it with a knife.”

“That all depends on Foster’s artistic abilities,” Keefe said, smirking. “Maybe you should just show me what they should look like.”

“Right.” Sophie closed her eyes, focusing on the memories of the gingerbread people her family made, and projected the image towards Keefe’s mind.

“Oof, well, that’s one way to do it…telepaths,” Keefe muttered, stumbling back a step and closing his eyes to focus. “Aww, they’re so cute!”

Keefe reached for the parchment paper and started sketching four little figures, eyes still shut. “Some of them look like they’re wearing little skirts…are these gingerbread families?”

“Kinda?” Sophie shrugged, rolling the dough a little thinner.

“Huh. Humans are kinda sweet.”

Keefe opened his eyes and surveyed his work. Sophie smiled; he’d doodled the little icing decorations onto each one. And the pang in her chest at the familiarity was bittersweet instead of merely sad.

Definitely an improvement.

Cutting out cookies with a knife definitely wasn’t as easy as a cookie cutter, but it was kinda cool to see how the icing designs would look while they were being cut. Edaline helped Sophie make the icing while the cookies baked, and somehow Keefe, while not being involved, _still_ managed to cover the entire kitchen in icing sugar.

“Your propensity for chaos knows no bounds,” Edaline remarked with a grin, snapping her fingers and conjuring the mess into the compost pile.

“I’ll admit, flour and icing sugar are easy targets,” Keefe said, pulling out a sheet of baked cookies. “Holy gulons, this smells _incredible._ ”

“No eating yet!” Sophie warned as Keefe reached for a gingerbread boy. “Let them cool a little bit and then we’ll decorate them…they’re even yummier with icing on.”

“I think I might experiment with ginger in my mallowmelt,” Edaline mused, using her hand to waft the scent of the gingerbread towards her. “Humans may eat meat, but they do have some fascinating spices.”

More and more gingerbread people finished baking, and Sophie found the piping bags that Edaline used to fill custard bursts and filled them with icing. “My human family…”

She felt Edaline and Keefe pause, and she couldn’t blame them. Sophie hardly ever talked about her human family. But maybe…maybe talking about them would make it hurt less.

“My human family would spend one evening at this time of year icing gingerbread cookies together, listening to Christmas music. My sister liked to pretend it was snowing outside, although we never had snow in San Diego in my entire life. She’d put little snowflake stickers on the windows. I looked forward to it every year.”

No one said anything, and Sophie fidgeted in her spot, grabbing a gingerbread man and beginning to ice him.

“I’ll make a note about this month,” Edaline said softly. “We’re not human, but that shouldn’t mean you miss out on things you love.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Sophie whispered. The gingerbread cookie she was icing looked strangely blurry.

“And have us all over when you’re doing it,” Keefe said. “I bet Dex and Fitz would be down to help me gross out Biana and Linh by biting off the gingerbread people’s heads.”

Sophie snorted, wiping her eyes. “Nothing says Christmas like headless gingerbread people.”

Keefe grinned, and something in Sophie’s chest…softened. Almost like she could see the bottom from that cliff, where before there had been only a void.

“I’m gonna decorate this one,” Keefe said, holding up a cookie that had become a little misshapen in transit to baking. “I bet I could make it look like Councilor Bronte in high heels.”

Even Edaline couldn’t help laughing.

It was nice, Sophie decided, that Edaline and Keefe were doing this with her. They decorated the cookies with elven circlets and capes, and it made a nice change. Felt like a new start, like a piece of her old life had finally healed into her new one.

"I’m going to bring _this_ one up to Grady,” Edaline announced, holding up one that Keefe had designed to look uncannily like Councilor Alina. “I think he’ll get a kick out of getting to bite off her head.”

“Guess I’ll make a few more, then we’ll all have the honor,” Keefe responded, waggling his eyebrows at Sophie.

Sophie giggled; it _would,_ admittedly, be nice to bite off the head of the councilor that had made her life fairly miserable for a period of time with an ability-inhibiting circlet. She’d blamed her friend, Dex, for it at first, despite not wanting to…but now she was entirely comfortable placing all the blame on Councilor Alina.

Edaline left with the doomed cookie, and Keefe turned to Sophie, cocking an eyebrow.

“You good over there? Something in your mood is…different.”

Sophie felt her cheeks flush, and she shrugged. “Oh…yeah, I’m good. It’s just…nice for the memories of my human life not to hurt so much.”

Keefe’s smile looked relieved and soft. “Hey, that’s great.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you back,” Sophie whispered.

Keefe scoffed. “What are you talking about? This was as helpful for me as it was for you. Plus, I got cool human cookies out of it!”

He picked up a gingerbread girl and waved it a little. Then he blinked. “Maybe I shouldn’t have phrased it that way…that makes it sound like the cookies are made out of humans.”

Sophie snorted, moving closer to him and picking up a gingerbread boy. “To our misery party of two.”

She tapped her cookie against his and took a bite.

Keefe looked a little confused, but he grinned and took a bite of his own.

“I like having you around, you know,” Sophie said under her breath as she reached for another cookie.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Sophie said at a normal volume, picking up another cookie and turning back around to face him with her best innocent look.

But he was a lot closer than she remembered him being.

“It wasn’t nothing,” Keefe murmured, smirking. “Could the Mysterious Miss Foster…care, about me?”

“Why did you ask me what I said if you heard me the first time?” Sophie asked, wishing her pulse would slow down and her face would stay normal-colored and her voice wouldn’t be so squeaky.

Keefe shrugged one shoulder, shifting a little bit closer. “Maybe…maybe I just thought it was nice to hear.”

“You _know_ I care about you, Keefe,” Sophie reminded him. “I say that sort of thing to you all the time.”

“Oh, I think we both know this is a little different than the other times,” Keefe said, and Sophie thought he looked a little…nervous?

One part of Sophie wanted to roll her eyes and change the subject—something she knew that she did a lot when this topic came up. The other part of her…knew he was right. She’d figured it was the Empath thing for a while, but now…she just felt a little more like the girl she wanted to be when Keefe was around. But she didn’t know exactly what that meant yet. She could easily keep things the same, since no one seemed to mind when she did. But…

Maybe if she wanted a little less turmoil in her life, she should start being honest out loud, with the people she really cared about. Especially when they looked nervous.

“I…I don’t know,” Sophie warned him. “I really don’t. But…maybe it _is_ different.”

Keefe blinked. “Wow. That’s…that’s a first for you, Foster.”

“I don’t know what it means. Like, at all,” Sophie went on, unsure what to make of the blooming color in Keefe’s face. “So this isn’t me saying anything definitive, really.”

He took one last step closer, and Sophie didn’t realize she’d stopped breathing until Keefe’s forehead rested against hers. “Okay.”

Now it was Sophie’s turn to blink. “Really? You’re okay with that?”

“You don’t know everything about me, Foster.”

His cocky smirk was back, but the color was still in his face and they were still standing forehead to forehead. “If you wanna figure things out, then do it. But…thanks for not avoiding it entirely this time.”

Sophie felt like her whole face was on fire. “Yeah, I know, I’m…not really good at this stuff.”

Keefe leaned back and gently booped her nose again, his smirk softer, somehow. “I know. Call it part of your charm.”

Sophie rolled her eyes this time, but she was still smiling.

“I think,” Keefe said, stepping back another step and picking up his half-eaten gingerbread girl, “that gingerbread is a new favorite of mine.”

Sophie grinned. “Good. Mine, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked it, PLEASE comment below! I'll never know if it was good unless you let me know!
> 
> I'm also on Tumblr as @silveny-dreams if you want more KOTLC content, such as Dank Keeper Memes.
> 
> Much love to you all xx


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